09 February 2012

Some interesting comments about Rwanda on my last post. I'm not going to touch this particular poverty vs human rights debacle with a barge-pole. In any case, I don't buy the argument at all that autocracy is in general in any way good for development (the data just doesn't support it). But I think you can make a reasonable case that you need to look at the change in governance as much as its absolute level in order to understand its impact upon the economy.

This chart shows trends in Rwandan governance, as measured by the Polity IV project. Positive on the scale is democratic and negative is autocratic. Above 6 gets you full democracy status and minus 6 full autocracy. Kagame came to power around 2000 (update: officially 2000, but effectively 1994?).

5 comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

I'm an economist, currently working as a Research Associate on Education at the Center for Global Development in Europe, and on a PhD at the University of Sussex. Before that I worked on policy as a civil servant and consultant in the UK and in Africa.

Subscribe

Subscribe via email

About

Because the consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else. (Lucas 1988, On the Mechanics of Economic Development)

I'm an economist, currently working as a Research Associate focusing on education at the Center for Global Development in Europe, and a PhD in economics at the University of Sussex. I used to be an Economist in South Sudan, hence the silly subtitle. Roving Bandit is a reference to Mancur Olson, not because I think I'm some kind of badass.